Turkiye

Right, well, Blogger is still not cooperating with the photos, but you can see most of them by using the Flickr badge on the sidebar to get to my Flickr account.

I spent a good chunk of today wandering around Camden Lock Market, given that it was such a gorgeous sunny day. Amazingly enough, I did not buy anything, but that may have a lot to do with all the money I just spent in Turkey, plus I'm still hooked on all the Arabian stuff, so a lot of things today just didn't look exotic enough ;) I walked around in flip flops, because who knows for how long I'll be able to keep doing that, but also after a week in sneakers/flats I think my feet have finally begun to forgive me for the high heels and wedges on nights out during the holiday.

A clarification: my mom had some sort of panic attack when she read about my tattoo. Apparently she hasn't looked at the pics yet, because if she had, she would have seen that this one is just henna. However, after 29 years of being vehemently opposed to tattoos, I am suddenly strangely fascinated. Ok, ok, maybe not 29 years, but at least 19. Anywho, oddly enough, I am considering a real tattoo...however, I might have to be seriously drunk to be able to go through with it. And I'm thinking it would be a pretty cool birthday gift to myself, but I will need someone with me to watch over the process if I'm going to self-anaesthetize myself with alcohol. What do you say, Viv, maybe something you can hold my through in Thailand or the Philippines in March? It's not a final decision, people, but I'm thinkin' on it.

I guess I will sum up some of what Maja and I did with our week in paradise, even though I can't punctuate it with pictures as I was hoping. We did a fair amount of shopping, the lion's share of which was probably jewelry. Although Maja spent a long time in a ceramics store, and went home with absolutely gorgeous hand-painted bowls and a vase. We did buy each other anklets on this trip (in the Dominican Republic we bought each other larimar rings). Although neither time have they been matching, we're not that cheesy...sheesh. Other things that we did in Bodrum itself (which was about 8 km from our hotel) were to visit the castle, sit at cafes and drink apple tea (something I introduced Maja to, and thankfully I can get easily at the Turkish Food Centre down the road from me), I tried donor kebab (delicious), and we watched all the kitties hanging out. Two years ago, Kristy and I discovered that Athens is the land of stray dogs, and Bodrum is apparently its counterpart for kitties. They were so cute! but I knew better than to be petting them. Oh yes, and we also discovered that Bodrum is another city that never sleeps. The shops stay open till midnight, and the clubs and bars never close! There was a really cool Catamaran club where you actually dance on a boat that sails out into the harbor, and has a glass floor, with small taxi boats that come every half hour throughout the night for people who want to leave before 6am, a couple of interesting bars on--wait for it--Bar Street, but by far my favorite was Halikarnas, an open air club on the shoreline across from Bodrum Castle. My biggest complaint in general about our nights out was that everything was techno, techno, techno everywhere. However, we did get some relief at Halikarnas where they put some R&B and hip hop stuff into the mix for a grand total of oh, about 30 minutes from midnight to 5am. They had awesome live acts, including three female dancers (I'm sure the highlight for many men there was the act where they wore white bikinis and danced in showers of water on stage), some hip hop male dancers who did some incredible moves that involved standing on each other in Matrix-esque poses, a Jamaican female singer with an awesome voice who sang live on top of whatever the DJ was playing, and lots more that I'm not remembering at the moment. Except for the foam, which they turned on around 3:30am. Not my favorite part. But overall, second only to Life in NYC, they did such a great job with the live show, and better than Life because it was open air and in paradise. And then there was the fact that I saw a shooting star that night, er, morning, as we finally got back to the hotel just before dawn- you'd have thought I'd won the lottery I was so excited, but it was just the perfect ending to a fantastic night. Oh, and those dolmuses I mentioned earlier (the cheap taxi buses)- they run all night long, so no horrendous highway robbery taxi fares!

Maja and I went on two day trips while we were there. One was to Dalyan, where we got on a boat, and first visited the mud baths. This is something that apparently Bosnians don't do, and I got very frustrated with Maja, but she wouldn't budge. So she took my camera and documented my fun with the bath, picking the mud up off the bottom to smear all over myself, and hamming it up with different poses once I'd been standing in the sun for awhile. It was funny, I did look a little like those street performers who paint themselves like statues, once the mud had dried. And yes, my skin did feel great once I'd rinsed off. We also visited these amazingly intricate cliffside tombs, built around 400 BC by the Lycians (though in the Greek style). And we spent some time after lunch on the famous Iztuzu Beack, better known as Caretta Caretta beach, caretta being the world for turtle. Loggerhead Sea Turtles have been nesting there for eons. Although we weren't there during the season, so there were no restrictions on where we could go. We were able to swim in the Mediterranean, (our hotel beach was on the Aegean), which was as warm as bath water, and had waves. Maja told me she didn't do waves, but I did get her to go in, and I had a ball doing hand stands, floating on my back, doing flips and dives over the waves. Oh, and I got a great picture of this lone Muslim woman covered from head to ankle, cooling off in the surf, amongst all the tourists. And they sucker-punched us on the way back that night, stopping at a jewelry factory, as they are apparently wont to do with these tours. I walked away with a silver belly chain, couldn't resist, but once the length was fixed by a silversmith back in Sarajevo, I must say I'm very happy with it!

Generally speaking, it was pretty hot, in the mid to high 90s all week (30-34 degrees Celsius), and all the restaurants in Bodrum were spraying mist from their roofs for the tourists to walk through. But of course, on the day of our party boat trip around Bodrum peninsula, it was very windy. So much so that there were waves and whitecaps at the hotel. But it turned out to be a good call to be on the boat. Once you laid down on the sunbeds on the top level, the wind was almost completely cut down. Plus the boat anchored in all the sheltered coves, so we were able to frolic and play in crystal clear, warm, calm bluey-greeny waters. Maja and I got some good color on that trip, met some fun Israeli guys we went out to a club with one night, said no to a camel ride on Camel Beach (the poor things were muzzled and tied down on their knees in between riders), and took some great pics.

Our hotel was absolutely great, once we got past the no-smoking room issue on the first day. We walked into our room and immediately started coughing the smoke smell was so bad. But the woman who answered our call at the front desk didn't want to give us a new room, and after offering that someone come down with a no smoking spray for the room, basically wiped her hands of us, and said we couldn't speak to a manager until the next morning. We were actually up at the front desk a short while later, and she pretended complete ignorance of the entire situation. But as it turned out, a different woman the next day (I don't know if she was a supervisor or not), did have some concept of customer service, and gave us a new room. It wasn't a no-smoking room, since out of 260-odd rooms they only have 8 that are non-smoking, but at least it didn't smell too badly of smoke. Other than that, our hotel was great. There was a beautiful pool, a private beach (pebbles, but small pebbles, I was ok with it) with calm turquoise waters, lots of waterfront activities, fitness rooms, massages available, 5 or 6 different bars, and an amazing smorgasbord of food for every meal. The beach, where we spent a great deal of time, also had straw umbrellas, padded sun loungers, and great big pillows you could lie on alone or use on top of your lounger. The beach was very European, in the sense that none of the guests except for me and Maja were speaking English, and in the sense that about half of the women were topless at any given time. We were rather put off by the girl who plonked down her chair in the surf just in front of us, and sat there topless with her legs spread wide, plucking the stray hairs off her bikini line with a pair of tweezers. It was right up there with the screaming, laughing Russian girls who came in at the end of our foam massage in the hamam, running around splashing each other with water, getting it all over us, and diving onto our massage mats the minute we vacated them, screaming, screaming all the while. Overall, our resort experience was fabulous, but there were these few episodes of eurotrashiness. The hotel put on a big Turkish night on 30 August, because it was their Victory Day, since apparently they've only had their independence as the Republic of Turkiye since 1922. They had belly dancers, fireworks, traditional dancers, and a traditional Turkish band, among other things, and there were Turkish flags everywhere in the resort and all over Bodrum. Not a trip I'm likely to forget any time soon :)